Repost: Incentivizing Active Learning in the Computer Science Classroom

Studies have shown that using active learning techniques improve student learning and engagement.  Anecdotally, students have brought up these points to me from my use of such techniques.  I even published at SIGCSE a study on using active learning, between undergraduate and graduate students.  This study brought up an interesting point, that I will return to shortly, that undergraduate students prefer these techniques more than graduate students.

Mark Guzdial, far more senior than me, recently challenged Georgia Tech (where we both are) to incentivize the adoption of active learning.  One of his recent blog posts lists the pushback he received, Active Learning in Computer Science.  Personally, as someone who cares about the quality of my teaching, I support these efforts although I do not get to vote.

Faculty members at R1 institutions, such as Georgia Tech, primarily spend their time with research; however, they are not research scientists and therefore they are being called upon to teach.  And so you would expect that they would do this well.  In meeting with faculty candidates, there was one who expressed that the candidate's mission as a faculty member would be to create new superstar researchers.  Classes were irrelevant to this candidate as a student, therefore there would be no need to teach well as this highest end (telos) of research justifies the sole focus on students who succeed despite their instruction, just like the candidate did.  Mark's blog post suggests that one day Georgia Tech or other institutions may be sued for this sub-par teaching.

What about engagement?  I (along with many students and faculty) attended a visiting speaker talk earlier this week and was able to pay attention to the hour long talk even though it was effectively a lecture.  And for this audience, it was a good talk.  The audience then has the meta-takeaway that lectures can be engaging, after all we paid attention.  But we are experts in this subject!  Furthermore, for most of us there, this is our subfield of Computer Science.  Of course we find it interesting, we have repeatedly chosen to study it.

For us, the material we teach has become self-evidently interesting.  I return to the undergraduate and graduate students that I taught.  Which group is closer to being experts?  Who has more experience learning despite the teaching?  Who prefered me to just lecture?  And in the end, both groups learned the material better.

Edit: I am by no means condemning all of the teaching at R1's or even Georgia Tech.  There are many who teach and work on teaching well.  The Dean of the College of Computing has also put some emphasis on this through teaching evaluations.  Mark's post was partially noting that teaching evaluations are not enough, we can and should do more.

Course Design Series (Post 2 of N): Choosing a Textbook

Having now read both Programming Language Pragmatics, Third Edition and Concepts of Programming Languages (11th Edition), I have settled on the former as my textbook for the fall.  I do not find either book ideally suited, and I wish that the Fourth Edition was being released this summer and not in November, which is why it still hasn't arrived.

For the choice of which textbook to use, it was "Concepts" to lose and having 11 editions, the text should also be better revised.  I dislike reading the examples in a book and questioning how the code would compile.  Beyond which, the examples felt quaint and contrived.

(edit) For example, I was reviewing the material on F# and copied in an example from the text:
let rec factorial x =
  if x <= 1 then 1
  else n * factorial(n-1)
Does anyone else notice that the function parameter is x on the first two lines and n on the last?!

Before the Concepts book is written off entirely, there are many valuable aspects.  I enjoyed reading about the history of programming languages, especially for exposing me to Plankalkül.  The work also took a valuable track in the subject by regularly looking at the trade-offs between different designs and features.  This point certainly helped inform my teaching of the material.

Fundamentally, when I looked at the price of the two textbooks, the benefits of using the newer Concepts textbook could not outweigh the nearly doubled pricetag.  Most of the positive points are small things and can be covered as addendums to the material.

(FCC note - Concepts of Programming Languages was provided free to me by the publisher.)